This Sustainable House

Posts Tagged ‘food’

One of the activities that I throughly enjoy is preserving. Be that storing peaches in light syrup, making an apricot jam (fantastic with a few vanilla beans) or brewing up a stunning batch of chutney. Preserving is a great way to store away the seasons excesses, and to impress visitors with their “take home” packs.

However there is a whole branch of preserving that I haven’t really ventured into, that of charcuterie or preserving of meats. Charcuterie originally referred to the production of pork products such as sausages, bacon & ham. However a more modern meaning is the production of meat products from any sort of animal.

Of course charcuterie isn’t just preserving, after all fresh pork sausages certainly qualify, however many of the products that are produced do in fact have a preserving effect… think hung salamis or legs of ham.

I decided to dip my toes into the water, so to speak, with producing my own bacon. Bacon was chosen as a starting point as it is one of those iconic meats imbued with so much flavor and memory. In fact, when I was a vegetarian (many moons ago) it was bacon that I truly missed not fillet steak. Also, bacon is a fairly easy meat to prepare requiring little specialized equipment or ingredients.

To make bacon all you need to do is coat pork (traditionally belly or loin) in a curing mixture allowing this mixture to draw out the excess moisture which could cause the meat to rot. This can then be sliced as it is, it’s called green bacon at this stage (Dr Seuss would be proud), or you can smoke it to add additional flavor.

The curing mix that I am using as 2kg pickling salt (don’t use table salt which has iodine added), 200g dark brown sugar, and ~1 tablespoon freshly cracked pepper. These are throughly mixed together and then handfuls are rubbed over the meat paying particular attention to cover the whole surface, including all the nooks and crannies. You can add saltpeter (Sodium Nitrate) into your curing mix, though I have chosen not to add this ingredient due to the link between heated nitrates, nitrosamines and cancer.

Once this is done, place the pork in a non-reactive container in a cool place. In 24hrs pour off any accumulated liquid, re-salt, and the replace. Basically you do this each day for between 5-14 days, depending on how salty you like your bacon.

Once the curing process is completed, then soak the pork in clean water for two hours. Discard the water and soak again for another hour in fresh water. Finally, hang the side somewhere cool for 1-2 days so that a pellicle can form. The pellicle is like a skin that’ll help preserve the meat for longer and allow an “attachment” point for smoke molecules, if you go down that path.

At this stage your bacon is good to eat as green bacon. Slice it, and enjoy!!!

Update: The very first streaky bacon side (made from pork belly) was tasted today. It has a very different taste to shop bought bacon and is quite salty. This isn’t terribly surpirsing as I salted it for 8 days, so the next belly will be done for 5-6 which should lessen the salt content. The one thing that you will notice with your home made bacon though is that it doesn’t shrivel away to nothing in the pan. Apparently this has to do with the copious quantities of water that is pumped into commercially produced bacon which is then released during cooking. In this case there isn’t any water to lose so it stays about the same size as the

Like a lot of people, I love sourdough bread. The complex flavours, the aromas, it’s enough to get the mouth watering just by thinking about it. Wonderful!!

However the key to a good sourdough is the starter… a colony of living breathing organisms (fungi and bacteria).There are a number of ways to create a starter such as seeding it with a commercial/existing starter, using commercial yeast to kick it off, or relying on natural yeasts/bacteria in your local environment. It is this latter approach that I have taken to create… “The Mulloonian!”

The starter is being created by mixing equal quantities of water and flour together, and then leaving the mix to ‘collect’ some local yeasts & bacteria. The mix will then need to be ‘fed’ every day for about a week. Feeding is pretty simple, basically we dump half the current mix and replace it with fresh water/flour mix.

After about a week, give or take, the mix should be good and bubbly, with a pleasant slightly sour smell. Bingo! We have starter…

Keep your starter in the fridge and feed it once a week or so. It’s pretty hard to ‘kill’ a starter unless you let it get too hot. Even starving it to death is difficult! If oc

casionally fed, then a starter can live for centuries… think of it as a family heirloom.

The TSH “Mulloonian” was kicked off earlier this evening and I’ll keep you posted on it’s developments… I feel like a father.

1/2/11 – Update – The Mulloonian burst into life this morning with some lovely bubbles appearing throughout the mix. It is also begginning to develop a little hooch, and a distinctly sour aroma… Live, Damn You! Live!!!!

7/2/11 – Update – The Mulloonian is definitely alive and breathing. It took about a week for the cultures to really get going, and now they are bubbling and boiling with that gorgeous distinctly sour smell. In addition, if you take a little taste it is so sour it’ll make your face screw up! Next step is to try our mix to make some bread…

The Mulloonian - Day 1

The Mulloonian - Day 7

Well it has now been a couple of months since the pigs first arrived at TSH (see Making a Pig of Oneself) but today the day finally came when it was time for them to move on.

They have done a stirling job digging and cleaning that garden area as the video below attests. The next step, after processing the pigs, will be to erect some temporary irrigation and then sow the area to green manure. This will grow for another couple of months, before another 5 piglets are brought in the to do the job for us again. The garden area should then be ready for planting in early spring.

The video below shows the wonderful work the pigs have done for us, and the end result of the last few months. I would like to warn those who find animal carcasses disturbing that there are images of the carcasses in this video. However there is a warning page allowing to you exit the video prior to the scene of the carcasses. There is no footage of the slaughter… that’s a private, and definitely unpleasant, moment.

The pigs were all slaughtered and dressed on-site, the advantage of which is that there was no transport stress whatsoever. It was just a normal day for the pigs until that rapid killing blow (by bullet). The downside of dressing them at home was that we had a few technical issues with the hot water production, leading to the animals having to be skinned… no crackling from our pigs. Not the end of the world, and will probably do our health a world of good anyhoo…

In 2003 Joel Salatin, of Polyface Farms, wrote an article of the above name. The article was written for Acres USA and can be found here. As much as I dislike ‘stealing’ his title (or is that research under the western academic system?) I have to admit that I haven’t yet come up with a title that sums this topic up more appropriately. My apologies Joel.

The point of this post is the raft of beaurucratically inspired idiocy that seems to pervade the ‘lucky country’. This is all the legislation, guidelines, audits, notifications, regulations, inspections, disallowable instruments, and general silliness by which the paternal state ‘protects’ our food supply. But who is this really protecting? The Consumer? Or vested interests in the industry? I am beginning to think it is the latter rather than the former. Read the rest of this entry »

Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” — no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food — the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food — stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

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Recently I picked up a copy of Michael Pollan’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” A book I have been meaning to read for some time.

This book examines the basis of the industrial food system in the US. A system which is not only prelevant in that country, but most of the western world.

It demonstrates the precarious reliance of our entire food network on a few crops, notably corn and soya beans, and the incredible success the food marketing machine has had in overcoming the ‘fixed stomach’ of it’s consumers. This concept revolves around the fact that no matter how abundant food is, there is only so much we can eat. However, even given this biological imperative, the system has encouraged us to eat more calories than necessary. This has lead to the improbable state where over 1 BILLION people suffer from over-nutrition, eclipsing the 800 MILLION suffering from malnutrition. (UN 2000) Certainly not a state that I was previously aware of.
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